Nadine's birthday food :)

I decided to make a recipe from The Complete Vegetarian Barbecue Book by Susan Geiskopf-Hadler. However, I forgot to buy mushrooms! So I used eggplant instead. And regular white potatoes because there weren't any red potatoes at the farmer's market on Sunday. (The recipe was 'Red Potato and Mushroom Skewers' by the way.)

So I cooked up some pasta (I was hungover and bought like 6 packets of different kinds of pasta for $1 each!) with some homemade basil pesto . This time I used my own homegrown basil and parsley as they are going nuts in this heat right now, and I also used pine nuts as we had some from a recipe we made ages ago. Then I mixed the pesto through the pasta with a little bit of the cooking water and topped with skewers that had the potato, eggplant and some kohl rabi on it. I had marinated the eggplant in some red wine vinegar and soy sauce for about 10 minutes before I made them. The eggplant soaked it up straight away.

The whole combination was rather delicious :)

And of course I had to make a birthday cake! This is a red velvet cake dyed with beetroot pulp and juice, with vegan cream cheese icing. I made a red velvet cake because the last time I attempted one (also Nadine's birthday) I didn't own an electric blender and it turned out an utter failure (I made 4 cakes stirred with a fork! Long story.). And tasted of food colouring. People at the party demolished it though! Ah, alcohol.

The picture came out way darker than it actually is! The cake was really a deep red/purple colour. Our cocoa powder also seems really dark so I used half the amount the recipe called for but it didn't seem to make a difference.

Anyhow it was still a rather good cake (and I really hate chocolate cake). I was going to cut the cake in half and put icing in the middle but the whole thing deflated to about half it's size! I am not sure why. Maybe because the recipe was for muffins. I just doubled it and stuck in a cake tin and baked it for ages. :)

I used this recipe from BitterSweet blog. The icing is just a basic cream cheese icing (¼ cup vegan cream cheese, ¼ cup vegan margarine, 2 cups icing sugar). Delicious but so sweet. I apologise to my teeth. I made double that because I thought I was going to ice the middle, so now we have leftover icing in the fridge. We almost managed a whole piece! Nadine liked it which is the main thing! Don't get me wrong I liked it too, but I'm not going to rush to make another one :)

 We ate it with this coffee substitute my step mum Margaret got us on to. Well she has Caro at home but this stuff was half the price for twice as much and had the same ingredients. It tastes a bit like coffee to me. I really like it, it's something a little bit different.